Acute HIV (AHI) infection is the stage of infection prior to seroconversion and proper diagnosis of HIV infection at this stage has remained unresolved with serious implications to public health—AHI is associated with the highest rates of secondary HIV transmission over the course of infection.
Seroconversion has historically been believed to begin around 21 days after infection and to be complete in the majority of cases within 3 to 8 weeks of infection and represents the period during which a person with AHI would test negative by conventional means such as ELISA or Western Blot. And while AHI may be clinically diagnosed, the symptoms are nondescript and present in only half of infected individuals.
Elevated risk of HIV transmission during AHI results from the fact that AHI is characterized by the highest levels of viremia in an infected person prior to the onset of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), reaching their peak around 21 days post infection. This is then followed by a sharp decline due to the mounting immune response and seroconversion. In fact, there exists a strong positive correlation between viral load and rate of HIV transmission—each log increase in viral load is associated with an increase by a factor of 2.45 in the risk of transmission. Behavioral factors also contribute heavily to the elevated rate of HIV transmission during AHI-infected individuals during AHI are seldom aware of their infected status and are likely to sustain the activities that led to their infection, which puts the uninfected population at risk. Therefore, there exists a great need to be able to properly diagnose AHI. The present invention meets this need.